Fastest WordPress Themes

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Your website’s traffic isn’t worth anything – if most of the people have to wait ages for it to load and then click the back button out of frustration. That’s why you should must get a lightweight and fast WordPress theme.

You will only make money from your site if your traffic converts. Otherwise, all the time and money you spend generating traffic is a waste.

Converting doesn’t always have to mean a sale. It might mean subscribing to your email list or clicking on an advertisement. Everyone wants a high conversion rate. But here’s the shocker:

If your website’s page speed is slow well then most of your visitors will hit the back button and never come back.

And if people don’t stay on your website, there’s no way they will ever convert. Simple as that.

As you will learn in the later section, your WordPress site’s theme makes a huge impact on your site’s speed. Choose a slow WordPress theme and your website will be slow as a snail.

So, if you want more people to stay on your website and convert (make a sale or subscribe), you will need a faster website

Let’s start off with explaining why having a fast loading WordPress theme is so important.

Why Site Speed Matters

According to KissMetrics, if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of your visitors will leave.

When people leave your website, you not only lose potential revenue but also all the money and time you spent generating traffic to your website.

And if you want to get to the first page of Google and stay there, you need a website that loads up fast.

Google’s algorithms prefer displaying websites that offer a great user experience (and site speed is a huge factor). In Google’s eyes, a website that offers good user experience generally has a lower bounce rate and loads up fast.

If your website is slow, most of your visitors will bounce back which will result in a loss in search engine rankings. Moreover, if you want to convert more visitors into customers or subscribers, your website needs to load up fast.

According to WebsiteOptimization.com, a slow website is not only perceived low-quality, it also sees a decrease in traffic by up to 20%.

The bottom line?

If you want your website to load up fast and secure the first spot in search engine results, you will need a WordPress theme that is fully optimized for speed.

The WordPress theme you use will have a massive impact on how fast your website loads.

If your theme offers every feature under the sun, is bloated with scripts and resources, and comes with lots of low-quality code, your website’s speed will suffer.

If your theme isn’t optimized for speed, whatever you do to improve your website’s speed will prove in vain.

Top 6 Fastest WordPress Themes

I know how difficult it can be to go through the thousands of free and premium WordPress themes available online and find the perfect one for your site.

What is the fastest wordpress theme?

So, below I have compiled a list of the fastest loading WordPress themes in 2019. All of these are lightweight WordPress themes that comes with quality code to speed up your WordPress site.

1. GeneratePress WordPress theme

Website: https://generatepress.com

Price: $49.95 with 30 days money back guarantee

Free version available: Yes

Google Speed Score: A (95%)

GeneratePress is a beautiful, light-weight theme for WordPress. It comes as both a free and premium version, but the paid version has lots more useful features.

GeneratePress is a multipurpose theme and is fully customizable, so you can use it to create any kind of a website. This theme has over 500 5-star ratings in the WordPress Theme Directory.

There are 15 modules that let’s you leverage the functionality of the theme and you can activate/deactivate the modules you aren’t using to make sure they don’t add extra load on your site. This modular approach allows you to improve your site speed all by yourself.

While the free version of the theme comes with dozens of awesome features, the premium version of the theme comes with pretty much everything you could ask for in a WordPress theme.

GeneratePress Premium – 15 Customizable Modules

For example, the premium version comes with support for WooCommerce, let’s you to make changes to the typography, styles and colors, and allows you to create custom sections in your pages. It also comes with custom hooks and function disable specific elements on certain pages and posts. The premium version comes with lifetime usage, 1 year of updates & support and a generous 30-day money back guarantee if you’re not happy.

What about speed? GeneratePress is one of the fastest WordPress themes alright, the demo site loads in just over 1 second! Wow!

GeneratePress is hands-down the fastest loading speed I have ever tried. I have seriously considered moving over all my sites to GeneratePress (including this one).

Built-in support for Schema Markup to help you achieve better rankings and a higher CTR in search engines.

Site library of importable ready-to-use demo sites to kickstart your WordPress site

Fully responsive design that looks great on all devices

The theme is translation-ready, so you can easily translate it into multiple languages.

Its lightweight framework makes your website load super fast.

Comes with full support for WordPress Theme Customizer, so you can easily make live changes to the design of your website without writing a single line of code.

Advanced customization that lets you disable specific elements on certain pages and posts, build unique layouts using sections inside your pages, and hooks allowing you to add in your own custom content throughout various areas in the them.

Comes with support for page builders such as Elementor and Beaver Builder to help you achieve higher levels of customization.

Allows you to easily customize every individual page on your website. You can choose whether or not you want to display a sidebar and on which side. You can also customize the footer widgets for every individual post and page.

GeneratePress is a fast loading, responsive, lightweight (less than 1MB zipped) and easy to use WordPress theme that is free to download. It’s also one of the most highly rated themes available on WordPress.org.

New and exciting updates to GeneratePress Premium

GeneratePress Premium 1.6 biggest update is without doubt the release of GeneratePress Sites. These are ready-made, and stunning and fast loading, sites you can import to give you a head start when building a new website.

GeneratePress brand new site library, comes with over 20 demo sites you can import right inside your dashboard

Once you have installed Premium 1.6, you can find the GeneratePress Sites in Appearance > GeneratePress > Sites. GeneratePress Sites come with all of the GeneratePress premium options and demo content.

Right now there over 20 GeneratePress Sites to choose from, but more will come and they’ll be delivered to your Dashboard automatically. One cool feature is that you can build and sell your own GeneratePress Sites, because they’re super easy to export and package up.

2. Astra WordPress theme

Astra is a lightweight, fast, page builder friendly WordPress theme that is designed by Brainstorm Force. Astra is a serious contender to GeneratePress.

Astra is a customizable theme that is very simple to use and master which will make your life so much easier when creating your website.

Not only that – Astra is also one of the fastest loading themes out there.

Oh and I should also mention that Astra is 100% free to download! It’s free for anyone to get started with and there’s no upfront cost. But you can extend Astra with affordable add-ons that extend the customization possibilities.

This is a theme that is built for page speed. Astra loads in less than half a second. It’s also performance optimized and feather light, because it needs less than 50 KB of resources to load. It uses no jQuery, it uses Vanilla JavaScript instead.

If you are looking for WordPress theme that’s fast, elegant and customizable, then you can’t and shouldn’t look past Astra.

Astra WordPress theme is free but as I mentioned you can extend it with addons that gives you loads more advanced features.

The Astra Pro Addon ($59) is a plugin that extends the free Astra theme and adds more features in it. The Astra Agency package ($249) offers readymade websites and includes all plugins that are used to build those websites.

Features:

Compatibility with page builders like BeaverBuilder, SiteOrigin, Elementor and Divi + more

Easy to use with a clean admin interface

Simple, yet beautiful designs for whatever type of business you are in

Dozens of pre-designed and turnkey stunning looking starter sites that you can import

Easy to customize without having to deal with code. You can change the design through range of options in the native WordPress customizer

SEO friendly foundation and all the necessary Schema.org markup

Extendible with hooks and filters that lets you customize any Astra theme

Astra is a WordPress theme that’s fast, elegant and customizable and compatible with most major page builders. Astra is free to download. It’s also one of the fastest themes, because it needs less than 50KB of resources. It uses no jQuery as it uses Vanilla JavaScript instead.

Schema is one of the fastest loading WordPress themes on the market. It features a custom options panel, shortcodes and widgets, reviews and a pixel perfect design. It comes with built in support for rich snippets and Schema.org mark-up to your website.

4. OceanWP WordPress theme

Website: https://oceanwp.org

Price: $39.00 with 14 days money back guarantee

Free version available: Yes

Google Speed Score: A (91%)

OceanWP is a 100% FREE multi-purpose WordPress theme that lets you build beautiful looking websites with WordPress. Nicolas Lecocq is the creator and you can download the theme from WordPress.org here.

OceanWP is all about user friendliness and you can import ready to use demo sites with a single click using the free import extension.

The free version comes with 7 free extensions but OceanWP also comes with 11 premium extensions that lets yo extend the theme further. You can either buy them individually starting at $9.99 each or you can get the premium bundle starting at $39 for a single site license.

5. StudioPress Themes

Website: https://www.studiopress.com

Price: From $99.95 (includes the Genesis Framework)

Free version available: No

Google Speed Score: A

Using a StudioPress theme has given over 200,000 WordPress users a solid, fast loading foundation for their site (including this site). All StudioPress themes are mobile responsive and have clean, lightweight code that ensure that your site is optimized for speed.

StudioPress themes, and the Genesis Framework it’s built, deliver speed and you immediately notice this when you use it. Here is a speed test of one of the more popular themes on StudioPress, it loads in well under 1 second! Wow!

Features:

Fast website loading times and a strong emphasis on security

Fully responsive HTML5 design for mobile users

No bloat from excessive built-in features, and clean code that will appeal to developers

Powered by the search engine optimized Genesis Framework codebase

Easy to keep updated as new updates can be automatically downloaded and installed

Unlimited, lifetime support and access to the Genesis team of experts and a large community

Why most WordPress themes aren’t optimized for speed

When you search for WordPress themes on Google, you will come across dozens of themes that look professional and offer a great design.

What you can see is how responsive the theme is or how cool the design looks, but what you can’t see is the code behind the theme.

The majority of Most WordPress themes are poorly coded and come bloated with dozens of resources (images css and javascripts) that can slow down your website.

Most WordPress theme developers will shout from their rooftops that all their themes are optimized for speed.

But here’s the honest truth: Most WordPress themes aren’t optimized for speed at all.

In fact, most WordPress themes don’t even follow the WordPress Community Coding Standards. Any theme that doesn’t follow these standards can and with time will become vulnerable to hackers.

These coding standards are there to make sure themes are coded to work efficiently and aren’t vulnerable to hackers.

How to test a WordPress theme’s load time?

If haven’t already purchased the theme or you are not the developer of the theme, then the only way to find out if a theme is optimized for speed – is to test the loading speed of the WordPress theme’s demo site.

The tool will take a few seconds to test the website then it will show you the number of seconds it takes to load the site.

If the demo site takes more than 5 seconds to load, then that’s the amount of time your site will take to load using that WordPress template.

Some studies show that you might only have four seconds before a web user moves on, i.e. you have very little time to make a good first impression.

How to more accurately predict a WordPress theme’s load time?

Using the 5 seconds or less is a good benchmark, but only looking at the actual load time of a theme demo isn’t the most accurate way of checking how fast the theme actually is. Why?

Because where the demo theme is hosted and the performance of the web host’s servers matter a lot, and you will most likely use different web host than what the theme owner is using

A better way of determining a theme’s speed is to look at the total page size and the number of requests it takes for the page to load.

These metrics are regardless of which web hosting provider the theme owner is using. Because the fewer requests for resources (JavaScript, CSS files, HTML, images, etc.) the smaller total page size is, and as a result, a faster page load time.

Why Avada isn’t a fast WordPress theme

Here’s an example of what it would look like using the Avada theme as an example (is the #1 selling theme on Themeforest – but it’s by no means the fastest). The Avada demo site loads very slow:

The load time of Avada is a whopping 8.6 seconds. Whoa that’s not good!

Again. If GTMetrix shows a theme demo takes more than 5 seconds to load, the theme will probably slow down your website and probably isn’t the best choice for you.

One More Thing You Need For a Fast Loading Site

The theme you use on your WordPress site will have a big impact on your site’s speed. But the web hosting service you use will probably have as big of an impact as your site’s theme.

If you host your website on a crappy web hosting service, you will get crappy results in terms of site speed. Most web hosting service providers offer cheap plans.

But these web hosts stuff too many accounts on a single low-quality server. This results in a slow experience for all the websites. And if one of your neighbor sites starts using too much server resources, the whole server might go down resulting in your site going down with it.

If you want your website to load fast and be up at all times, you should go with SiteGround. It’s my #1 choice when it comes to WordPress hosting services.

About Matt Ahlgren

Hi 👋 I'm Matt. I'm an online marketer and web developer who write reviews and tutorials on web hosting, wordpress, online marketing and web development because I wanna help people run their own websites better. You can contact me directly at hello[at]websitehostingrating[dot]com

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Just finished testing 3 themes on a vanilla install of WordPress. Installed Generate Press, Astra and OceanWP Themes. Built a near blank Home Page and set it to be the Home Page – not using any demo content, etc.

No Sticky Menus on all themes. Generate Press and OceanWP do Not have an editable footer credit (not without hacking the core) Astra Does have an editable footer from within Customizer – nice! And thanks Brainstorm Force.

So my pick is Astra and I’ll be loading it up with Elementor page builder. No doubt I’ll also be bloating it up with other things 🙂 but it’s the right theme to start with imho.

Great, and honest article about the best wordpress themes when looking at the code and best practice! (Even though there are probably some affiliate stuff involved). It seems as Astra has better demo themes to implement compared with GP. It is not that clear if Astra is as fast and well-made (clean and SEO) as GP?